Parenting & Teaching as Practice of Co-Liberation

On parenting and teaching as central to dismantling systems of oppression

New folks—welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. Some quick things before we dive in:

A thank you! Thanks for all the well wishes. COVID’s been thankfully mild, our kids are still COVID-free and therefore able to attend school, and I’ve had a breath to get some reading and writing and napping in, which feels really good.

Vote for this work: If you’re financially able to support the dream of making this work my livelihood, please take a beat to upgrade to a paid subscription. It makes a tangible, awesome difference in making that dream a closer reality when you do. If that’s not in your means, sharing pieces you dig with friends is another awesome way to vote for this work.

Take a poll! Let me know what keeps you reading my RM essays:

Okay, lovelies. Thank you for being here!

RM

---

My journey rearing humans didn’t start the day my eldest was born. I had been in the field of education, in some form or another, for about a decade before that. I studied Paolo Freire in college, got my M.S. in teaching in New York, taught elementary school in West Harlem, and managed teaching teams at education non-profits before my eldest arrived and shattered all I thought I knew.

With my professional background in my pocket—and honestly for many reasons because of it—I have had serious misadventures raising my own kids in connection and co-liberation, which my eldest can most definitely speak to. At length.

There’s so much to unlearn! The society we live in constantly reinforces so much of what we’re trying to push up against. And, we’re tired! As parents and mothers, talking about how to parent or educate our kids can be so charged because so many of us are just trying to survive each day in political, social, and economic constructs not made for our thriving. The constructs to support us are pretty non-existent.

And yet. Parenting is a ripe portal for practicing co-liberation. When else are all your triggers and inner child wounds laid bare on the daily, asking for repair? If we’re here talking about dismantling systems of oppression, how we parent and teach our kids is inextricably connected to our own healing and freedom—to everyone’s healing and freedom.

And, whether we are conscious of it or not, parenting and educating our children is political. The way we parent and educate our children is one of the primary ways we either reinforce or disrupt our current societal systems of oppression. It is an indoctrination into the world our kids will inherit. How we approach both is, as Bell Hooks says in Teaching to Transgress, “the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination.”

So if we want to create a co-liberated world, we consciously have to choose to parent and educate as a practice of freedom. And we have to know how to tell the difference between systems that reinforce the current constructs and ones that dismantles them.

First, let’s name the inherent power dynamics at play between children and their parents and educators. As parents, we hold unquestionably more power than our children, and whether consciously or not, we serve as a child’s primary blueprint for how to be in relationship to power. That blueprint will guide them in navigating early relationships with peers, navigating classroom dynamics, navigating school systems, and then navigating societal systems.

When we look at the educator/student relationship, adults hold official institutional power, but it gets more nuanced as we start to layer in the race, class and gender of both the educator and the students. For example, while an adult teacher has officially more power, an affluent White student taught by a working-class Black teacher, might have at their disposal—by way of their parents—more unofficial institutional power than their teacher.

Noticing who holds power matters. And what we do with that power—what we teach our children to do with that power— also matters.

As adults, what do we do with the power we hold? How do we disrupt oppressive power hierarchies, and teach our kids to do the same?

If we want to raise kids who feel confident pushing up against, challenging, and dismantling unfair power dynamics and oppressive systems, we have to start with disrupting power hierarchies within the child/adult relationships. And we do that by parenting and teaching toward liberation.

I’ve been playing with this working definition for liberation-based child-rearing:

Liberation-based child-rearing is a relational, consent-based approach to parenting and teaching where the adult works to understand the power dynamics at play and actively facilitate sharing that power across age, race, class and gender in order to disrupt the traditional oppressive hierarchies within the safe container of the adult/child relationship.

A few key tenants to this practice:

It is consent-based

Children maintain active agency over their bodies, their time, and their needs. They learn to balance their needs with the wider community, but they are given agency to drive their own learning, to follow their curiosity, to know their needs, to say no.

As fellow Substack writer, Francesca Liberatore puts it:

Consent is not a minor issue, or the least of our problems. Consent is actually the main issue. Because at the root of poverty, inequity, and marginalization is the way societal systems have evolved to use power over to extract, mistreat and oppress groups of people.

Consent is, as Sophie Christophy says, “the antidote” to systemic oppression. It is the thing we need the most, in fact, if we are to slowly and painfully rebuild the ways we relate to one another from the ground up.

It is a practice in power-sharing

Teachers and parents work to actively disrupt power hierarchies between students and educators by sharing their power. Adults act as facilitators and guides rather than as disseminators of information. Adults actively facilitate both the awareness of and the disruption to power dynamics that exist across race and class and gender. If we want to teach our children to disrupt oppressive systems, we have to actually model what it looks like to disrupt oppressive systems in our relationships with them.

Every community member is seen and valued

In stark contrast with an industrial model of education that treats students as “units,” each student and community member is seen, valued, and honored for their unique contribution. We work to create a community that trusts their race, class, gender, temperaments, interests, weird cool quirky out-of-the-box idiosyncrasies, are not only accepted but valued and celebrated. That our uniqueness makes our community—whether our family our our classroom—richer and better. Because not only does this work fully acknowledge and respect everyone’s humanity, it also disrupts the industrialized model of conforming to a standardized White-normative, patriarchal capitalist culture.

It is inner work

When I say parenting and teaching are portals to co-liberation, I mean that, when we pay attention to the triggers parenting and teaching lay bare, we can actively tend and heal those triggers, which allows us to better show up for ourselves and those around us. Our triggers often reinforce power dynamics, whether we are unconsciously acting out the role of the oppressed or the oppressor. Inner work is an essential piece of actively disrupting unhealthy power dynamics both inside and outside of ourselves.

Students drive their own learning

A liberation-based home or classroom allows students to follow their interests to the nth degree. It is a place of possibility, of YES ands, of wonder and joy and uninterrupted flow. It is a place of unhurried time, where projects can last fifteen minutes of fifteen hours or fifteen weeks. It is a place where students can flow in and out of working together, some working in-depth alone, some with a buddy, some with a whole gaggle of kids. Giving students the agency over the way they spend their time allows them to experience what it feels like in their bodies to know their needs and honor them—to have their temporal autonomy fiercely protected. This also makes space for unhurried slowness, which actively disrupts our industrialized perceptions of time that feed into capitalist cycles of production.

It centers excitement and pleasure

Bell Hooks writes about the idea that a classroom setting should be exciting as central to her pedagogical approach. She says: “If boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere.” I do think there is a space for the cyclicality of boredom in the creation process, and I think that type of boredom is very different from disengagement or passive ingestion of content. Writers like Ross Gay, who’s study of joy and delight as an act of resistance, point to something critical: we can’t know what we want to move toward if we’re just living in the critical space of what we’re fighting against. And joy is such a resounding indicator of what one wants to move toward.

It is responsive

Liberation-based way of being with kids is both flexible and responsive. We attune to the kids, we meet their needs, we take our plans for the day and bend and mold and shape them. Our plans are designed with self-direction, consent, and power-sharing in mind. We move through space with a respectful attunement to the wider community, and a flexibility to match the needs of the moment.

Creating rigid lesson plans and containers would make it pretty impossible to fulfill the needs for power-sharing, consent, seeing and valuing students, and excitement/joy. There’s a healthy tension here, though, between making sure an adult creates a safe container exists, and that students have access to the building blocks they need to thrive as a self-directed learner. Parents and adults are still responsible for creating safe containers, but those containers have to be designed to help the other components flourish.

It is political

I find that in predominantly White self-directed education spaces, some folks want to treat education as apolitical. For example, I recently heard a White parent say, “why do we need to teach an eleven year old about oppression?” I remember hearing these comments from preschool parents when our kids were three and feeling kind of sad. But Eleven? Sigh.

For folks pursuing self-directed education and consent-based parenting but who are not comfortable acknowledging the racial, class, and gender constructs that give some folks more institutional power and wealth and freedom than others, you might want to pause and ask: is this actually a liberation-based practice, or am I simply reinforcing the current system of domination? If it feels free, ask: free for who?

Hooks says:

It is necessary to remind everyone that no education is politically neutral…we had to work constantly through the overwhelming will on the part of folks to deny the politics of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and so forth to inform how and what to teach. We found, again and again, that almost everyone…were more disturbed by the overt recognition of the role our political perspectives play in shaping pedagogy than by their passive acceptance of ways of teaching and learning that reflect biases, particularly white supremacist standpoint.

The reality is, we are swimming in a toxic soup of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Homeschooling can reinforce a system of domination. Self-directed education can reinforce a system of domination. Public schooling can reinforce a system of domination. Private schooling can enforce a system of domination. All schooling and all parenting, left to its own devices in this construct, can and will reinforce systems of domination. Without an active practice in dismantling power hierarchies within a politicized framework, we will simply reinforce the current constructs.

In whatever context we find our parenting and our kids’ schooling, we need to pause and ask ourselves” is this approach a practice of freedom or does it reinforce domination? And, even if it feels like a practice of freedom, we ask: freedom for who?

I know that last pieces is a question that’s very alive for me. As always, would love to know what resonates with you.

In co-liberation,

RM

---

If you’re able, support this writing with your paid subscriptions, which covers the childcare I need to write. I feel so cared for with your support—thank you!

Some of you have been gifting subscriptions to friends, which is awesome. If you have a friend who might dig this work, consider gifting them a subscription.

Like this post? why not share it? Your support in sharing this piece with folks who might appreciate it means the world—thank you!

I’m slowly putting together my bookshelf of current reads and favorites, and would love for you to join me in pulling threads together. Let me know if you’re reading along—I’m always down for a good book chat.

Follow @radicalmatriarch on instagram to check out what I’m up to in my art and life and community-building.